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England Quotes

“I don't like the idea of missionaries. In fact, the whole business fills me with fear and alarm. I don't believe in God, or at least not in the one we've invented for ourselves in England to fulfill our peculiarly English needs, and certainly not in the ones they've invented in America who supply their servants with toupees, television stations and, most importantly, toll-free telephone numbers. I wish that people who did believe in such things would keep them to themselves and not export them to the developing world.”

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Author:Douglas Adams
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“America is a younger country than England, obviously, and as self-awareness is forming in America - are we a collection of immigrants, are we a load of Italians and Germans and Jews and Brits and Irish, or are we a country with a soul and an identity? - there was a subliminal sense, they knew that the writers would be the ones who would answer those questions.”

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Author:Martin Amis
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“The difference between America and England is that the English think 100 miles is a long distance and the Americans think 100 years is a long time. The difference between an autobiography and an unauthorized biography is like the difference between an account of your life written by your mother and one written by your mother-in-law.”

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Author:Marilyn vos Savant
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“To the Calvinists, more than to any other class of men, the political liberties of Holland, England, and America are due.”

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Book:History of the United Netherlands, from the Death of William the Silent to the Synod of Dort: With a Full View of the English-Dutch Struggle Against Spain, and of the Origin and Destruction of the Spanish Armada
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“I'm popular in the United States and I'm popular in England. England is just more concentrated. The people are closer together. Venues are closer together. Many albums of mine have been popular in England, but, no hit singles. All the hit singles I had were before I went to England. So, I'm not necessarily more popular in England, I'm just popular in England, and more so for my performances than hit records. But, I enjoy doing concert halls all over America, England, Scotland and Australia.”

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Author:Jack Jones
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“When you go to that other country you realize that in France and in England, you don't ask somebody what they do for a living when you meet someone. A lot of the obvious things, the shortcuts we take in America - in America you can talk about money all you want. You can ask how much they make, rent they pay, how much their house costs and how much their car costs, and they'll feel comfortable telling you. But it's scandalous to ask anyone in England or France a question like that.”

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Author:David Sedaris
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“In America, if your next-door neighbor has a Rolls-Royce, you want one too. But in England, if your neighbor has a Rolls-Royce, you want him to die in a fiery accident. That's a quote from someone else, but there's something about American optimism, that feeling you can do anything if you're at least middle class in America. If I can have a writing career, anyone can. There's nothing special about me.”

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Author:David Sedaris
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“When I heard the truth about my name was not Cassius Clay, like I knew a black man in America named John Hawkins. Now, you know who John Hawkins was.He was a slave trader from England. But the white people of that time, if one had five slaves and his name was Jones, they would be called Jones' property. [...] Now that I'm free, now that I'm no longer a slave, then I want a name of my ancestors.”

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Author:Muhammad Ali
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“I understand that the worst people in England at a time were ran to America, for some reason. Then slavery came and calls of aggression. But we've been there 600 years and there ain't no peace between black and whites because the cultures are different - like the Chinese and Mexicans cannot integrate: the music is different, the eating is different.”

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Author:Muhammad Ali
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“Beginning in the sixties, but getting strong during the seventies and eighties, everybody was sort of Miles Davis and Chick Corea and the jazz guys on the west coast and east coast in America, and then in Switzerland and lots of groups in England and elsewhere, like here in Brazil. We were all under a heavy influence of technological gadgets and changes that we used as elements to produce and create music.”

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Author:Gilberto Gil
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“Malcolm Bradbury made the point, and I don't know whether it's a valid one or not, that the real English at the moment is not the English spoken in England or in America or even in Canada or Australia or New Zealand. The real English is the English which is a second language, so that it's rather like Latin in the days of the Roman Empire when people had their own languages, but had Latin in order to communicate.”

PeopleKnowsMadeRealMomentsAmericaOrderLanguageEnglandCommunicateCanadaEmpiresAustraliaLatinRoman EmpireNew ZealandBradbury
Author:William Golding
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“I guess it's interesting traveling, for me, because I never in my life until doing this felt a sense of being from anywhere particularly, whereas now I do feel quite European. Even if we don't get up to England, if we're in France or somewhere like that, it feels more like going back somewhere familiar - more than even America, where we share a lot of cultural stuff.”

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Author:Will Farquarson
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“I always thought that the location of this film [Girl In The Train] was on the train and inside her imagination, and her loneliness and her gaze out the window.Although it was set in England, it didn't feel to me like an overly English book. In terms of the use of cultural references, it was not extreme, so it was very simple to go from England to America in the adaptation.”

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Author:Erin Cressida Wilson
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“I asked a girl who came from America to England, when I was only English, and she admitted she had been to a drama school. And I said, "What did they teach you?" And she said, "They taught me to be a candle burning in an empty room." I'm happy to say she was laughing while she said it, but she meant it. I've never learned to be a candle burning in an empty room. So I go on the screen, and I say whatever I'm told to say.”

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Author:Quentin Crisp
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“As early as 1776, [John Adams] expressed his doubts about America's capacity for virtue. "I have seen all along my Life, Such Selfishness, and Littleness even in New England, that I sometimes tremble to think that, altho We are engaged in the best Cause that ever employed the Human Heart, yet the Prospect of success is doubtfull not for Want of Power or of Wisdom, but of Virtue."”

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Author:Gordon S. Wood
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“The reason I live in America is because I mean literally every six or seven years I've done something in England. The last lead I had in an English film I did was 1998. So that's why I live here. It's because I get more work. I'll travel back for radio, you know what I mean. I've just got to consider myself to be living in the middle of the ocean, and that way I have a really nice career, if I'm prepared to do television, radio, theater, and film.”

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Author:Rufus Sewell
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“I think the whole emphasis in England, in universities, on practical criticism (but not that so much as on historical criticism, knowing what period a line comes from) this is almost paralysing. In America, in University, we read - what? - T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Yeats, that is where we began. Shakespeare flaunted in the background. I'm not sure I agree with this, but I think that' for the young poet, the writing poet, it is not quite so frightening to go to university in America as it is in England, for these reasons.”

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Author:Sylvia Plath
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“America as a setting seems inexhaustibly fascinating to me, and I think there's something about the outsider viewpoint that works for me. Being of Jewish descent in England always carried a vague sense of being foreign, while not being a practicing Jew made it hard to think of myself as fully Jewish either. So living here in a way just clarifies that terminal outsider position - makes it somehow official, which I like.”

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Author:James Lasdun
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